Sacrifice of Buntings Read online

  Rachel pulled her fingers through her hair and thought about it. She was wearing a long-sleeved shirt over her tank top, check, long pants, check, socks and tennis shoes, check, check. Her binoculars were inside her backpack along with a field guide, a Georgia checklist, insect repellent, sunscreen, water, snacks, and some money for the ferry and lunch. As an afterthought, she added her travel guide and the program with the field trip description.

  “How about your name badge and your trip ticket?” Lark asked.

  Those were items Rachel had forgotten.

  Snatching her badge holder off the bedside table, she slipped it around her neck and stuffed the ticket in behind the name tag. Check, check.

  She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, stopped, and scooped her auburn curls into a ponytail, feeding it through the hole in the back of her cap and forcing upon it some semblance of control. Swiping a final layer of sunscreen across her nose, she said, “Okay, I’m ready.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  The hallway was empty, which meant either everyone else was sleeping, or the two of them were running quite late. Based on Dorothy’s pacing of the foyer, Rachel guessed the latter.

  “There you two are,” Cecilia said, shoving a cup of coffee into Rachel’s hands. “We need to hurry.”

  Lark drove. Rachel waved at the one or two protestors standing at the end of the drive. Five minutes later they pulled into the parking lot at the convention center.

  “That’s the bus. You had better step lively,” said a volunteer, wearing a beige sweatshirt embellished with the conference logo. She pointed them toward the bus—a retired Greyhound, painted green, with “Okefenokee Swamp Tours” stenciled on the side in hot turquoise.

  Rachel climbed the steps and found herself standing in an aisle between two rows of worn, cloth-covered seats. Birders packed the inside. Birding scopes, backpacks, and jackets were jumbled into the overhead storage, and Guy Saxby sat front and center, holding out a hand for their tickets.

  “Glad you could join us, ladies.”

  Rachel worked to extricate her ticket from behind her name badge with one hand. Giving up, she tried handing her coffee cup to Dorothy, who kept staring at Saxby and wouldn’t respond. She must not have read her program book. “Dorothy!”

  The woman startled, a pinkish stain flooding her face. “Sorry,” she mumbled, taking the cup.

  Rachel suppressed a smile.

  Dorothy continued to preen while Rachel fished out her ticket. The older woman shifted her weight from side to side, fluffed her hair with her free hand, and chattered nonstop to Cecilia about how excited she was to go on this particular field trip.

  “Here you are,” Rachel said, handing Saxby her ticket. She waited for Dorothy to notice she was ready to take back her cup.

  “Thank you,” Saxby replied, gesturing for her to pass.

  “You’re welcome.” She signaled Dorothy to give back her cup. Dorothy just kept up the patter.

  “I can take that back now,” Rachel said.

  Dorothy’s face grew redder.

  By the time Rachel had recaptured her coffee, Lark had moved to the back of the bus. Rachel followed, winding her way through the elbows that jutted out into the aisle. Behind her, Dorothy pulled Cecilia into the empty front seat reserved for the second trip leader.

  “Check it out,” Rachel said, slipping past Lark to sit next to the window. “Dorothy has a crush on Saxby.”

  “Dorothy and half the women on the bus.”

  There was truth in that statement. A lot of the female birders had crammed themselves into the front seats, where they twittered like a sacrifice of female buntings lusting after the feeder bird. In the back around Lark and Rachel sat mostly couples and a few stray men.

  Rachel watched Dorothy laugh at something Saxby was saying, and then watched Saxby smile. It seemed like he was going to let them stay in the reserved spots. Settling back against her seat, Rachel closed her eyes and listened to the snatches of conversation floating around her. From what she could tell, the birders comprised an eclectic bunch—young and old, rich and poor, experienced and relative beginners. Based on some of the terms being bantered about, several were clearly professionals—people who either specialized in bird-related areas or had made birding their postretirement profession. Across the aisle were a housewife and her daughter, a student from the University of Georgia. A doctor, a dentist, and a lawyer rounded out the seating, with at least one pseudo-auto mechanic giving someone directions on changing the oil in a BMW. This was a bus full of people, Rachel decided, who came from all over, united by only one thing—a desire to see birds.

  A burst of static caused Rachel to open her eyes. The passengers quieted, and Saxby rekeyed the mike. “Hello.”

  “Hello,” the groupies in the front parroted.

  “Are we ready to go birding?”

  “Yes,” the groupies replied.

  “I can’t hear you in the back. Can you all hear me?”

  Heads bobbed.

  “I asked, are we ready to go birding?” Saxby raised his voice and held out the microphone.

  “Yes,” the busload responded.

  Rachel sipped her coffee.

  As if on command, the old Greyhound sputtered to life. A white mist spewed from the vents, and a murmur rippled through the bus. Saxby leaned toward the driver—a tall, well-built man with a short brush haircut. He grinned into the rearview mirror.

  “It’s okay, folks,” he said in a deep Southern twang. “It’s just the swamp cooler kicking in.”

  The ladies in the front giggled.

  Saxby smiled. “This is Dwayne,” he explained, gesturing toward the driver. “One announcement: Evan Kearns can’t be with us today. He was scheduled to be my co-leader, but some changes have occurred in the weekly program, and he needed to stay behind and orchestrate things.”

  Rachel and Lark exchanged glances.

  “We’ve been more than compensated for his loss, however. We have several people taking this trip who are more than qualified to take his place.” Saxby pointed out two men seated in front of Lark and Rachel. “Would you two mind raising your hands, gentlemen? Folks, if you have any questions about what you’re seeing and you can’t find me, these are the guys to ask.”

  The bus lurched forward, and Saxby grabbed for a handrail. Rachel instinctively checked her watch. A definite on-time departure!

  “Now, we have a half-hour’s drive to the ferry,” Saxby said, “so sit back, relax, and let me tell you a little bit about Sapelo Island.”

  His voice droned on with information straight out of the program book, and Rachel leaned over to Lark, keeping her voice low so no one could hear her. “He’s really more Sean Connery-ish than you think.”

  “Oh, please.”

  Rachel put her finger to her lips. “Seriously, he’s got the nicely trimmed moustache, the beard, and his eyes are to die for.”

  Lark wrinkled her nose. “Right, if you’re Dorothy’s age.”

  “Is that what bugs you, his age?”

  Lark checked to see if anyone was listening and then leaned closer to Rachel. “Remember how I said he had a reputation?”

  “The Indiana Jones of birding.”

  “Right, well the same goes with the ladies, and rumor has it he likes them young.”

  “How young?”

  “Too young.”

  “Do you mean like underage?”

  “Not that young.”

  “And you don’t approve.”

  “No!” Lark looked shocked. “Do you?’

  Rachel had never given it much thought. She knew a few couples with age differences, and they seemed happy. Meanwhile, she and her ex-husband had been close in age, and look what had happened to them.

  “Doesn’t it bug you when movie heroes are paired with women half their age?” Lark asked.

  “Maybe a little,” Rachel admitted, and she couldn’t deny, it had creeped her out when Saxby had given her the once-over at the na
ture center. Tucking her feet up in the seat, she watched Dorothy flirt across the aisle through the notch between the headrests. “Maybe turnabout is fair play,” she said, jerking her head toward the front of the bus. “In this case, rather than a she’s May and he’s December romance, she’s December and he’s August.”

  Lark stuck her head out into the aisle and then quickly pressed back against her seat. “He’s October,” she corrected, “which means we have nothing to worry about.”

  • • •

  Rachel must have dozed off, for the next thing she knew she was jolted awake as the bus lurched to a stop in front of the Sapelo Island Ferry building. Propelled by the salty sea air and a bevy of birders, she made her way onto the boat; a half hour later, she found herself standing at the rail scanning the Sapelo Island shoreline.

  Waterfowl was scarce, the sign of an early spring, though several flocks of birds dotted the beach.

  “Does everyone see the great black-backed gulls?” Saxby asked, pointing along the beach. “Beyond them is a flock of terns. On the far left, you’ll see a gull-billed tern.”

  Rachel peered through her binoculars and panned the shore.

  “Do you see it?” Lark asked.

  “No.” Rachel swept her glasses over the huddled terns, butts to the shoreline, their faces tipped to the wind. “Wait, does it have a black crown and a short black bill? Sort of light gray, with a white breast?”

  “That’s it.”

  “I count more than one.”

  “There are twenty-four,” Saxby affirmed. “Does everyone have them?”

  A murmur passed through the crowd.

  A few moments later, Dorothy picked up a whimbrel. The large gray-brown bird with its strong black head stripes poked its downcurved bill at the sand like a picky eater knocking peas aside with a fork.

  Then the ferry docked, and Saxby gathered them around. “From here we go by hay wagon,” he said. “Everyone sit in the middle and look to the outside. Whatever you do, hang on.”

  Dorothy grabbed Rachel’s hand, pulling her up to the front to sit beside her and near Saxby. “Listen to him, dear,” she said. “He knows his birds. When he points them out, you’ll have a better chance of identifying them.”

  Rachel felt her feathers ruffle. The idea that Dorothy had announced she needed help annoyed her. Not that she didn’t need help, mind you, but she had gotten better at birding in the past couple of years. She may have been a little raw the last time she had birded with Dorothy, but since then she had gone out birdwatching on a weekly basis with Kirk. Maybe she should state the obvious—that she was Dorothy’s excuse for sitting near Saxby again.

  The wagon lurched forward, and Rachel anchored herself on a hay bale as the truck jounced away from the beach. Passing the dunes, they moved into a new zone where wax myrtles—dwarfed and entangled with cat brier, pepper vine, Virginia creeper, and Muscadine grape—formed a shrubby thicket.

  “We’re going to make a few stops,” Saxby announced. “This first habitat is called a shrub thicket. This will be the best location to see painted buntings, Acadian flycatchers, and yellow-rumped warblers.”

  “There’s one,” shouted an excited middle-aged woman.

  “Keep your voice down!” Saxby ordered.

  Startled, the woman’s chin quivered.

  Realizing his mistake, Saxby softened his expression, reached out, and patted her arm. “We need to use conversational voices when spreading the word,” he said in a gentler tone. “Here we are close enough to the birds that we don’t want to scare them. We want everyone to have a chance to see them.”

  “Acadian flycatcher,” Lark said. “Passenger’s side.”

  The woman flashed Saxby a watery smile and turned to look.

  “Painted bunting, two o’clock in the wax myrtles, driver’s side,” someone else called out.

  “Butter-butt.”

  “Excuse me?” Rachel looked around to see who had said that, and spotted Dwayne, the bus driver, sitting two seats away.

  “It’s a local’s nickname for the yellow-rumped warbler,” he explained over his shoulder. “Little bird. Yellow rump.”

  “You’re a birder?”

  Now she sounded like Saxby. Dwayne had on all of the right garb, and he carried a pair of Zeiss binoculars.

  “Of course you are,” she said.

  “Actually, I’m a swamp rat. My mother, my brother, and I run canoe tours in the Okefenokee Swamp.”

  “That’s our Friday tour.” She gestured between herself and Lark, Dorothy, and Cecilia.

  “Sweet.” He winked, and Rachel felt herself color.

  He was flirting with her, not that he wasn’t attractive in a rough sort of way. Tan, with tattoos that covered both of his forearms, his body looked made of hard work. Take away the small silver hoop earring that dangled from his left ear, and he could pass for a Marine.

  “If you’re a tour leader, why are you driving the bus?”

  “It’s the property of the Okefenokee Swamp Tours. Evan came up a ride short, and I offered to help. It seemed like the neighborly thing to do. Besides,” he winked again, “it gives me a chance to catch the view on Sapelo.”

  Rachel felt her face burn.

  Dwayne turned back around, settled his baseball cap backward on his head, and pointed into the thicket. “There’s another butter-butt.”

  Rachel turned her attention back to the birds, and to Saxby. He was the real target, and she needed to keep her eye on the ball.

  All around them, people had set up spotting scopes. She had learned to use one in Elk Park, her first lesson being on that ill-fated day when Lark’s business partner, Esther, was murdered. It had taken Kirk a while to get her to try scoping again, and now she was addicted. She had signed up for the digiscoping course on Thursday and watched one man with particular interest.

  “That’s Chuck Knapp,” Saxby said.

  “Should I know him?” Rachel asked. He was a small man, and hairy, with a round bald spot on his pate. She couldn’t recall ever having seen him before.

  “He’s a very famous filmmaker and wildlife photographer,” Saxby said. “Everyone knows Knapp.”

  Not everyone. At the risk of coming off stupid, she asked, “What are some of his films?”

  “His best known is the IMAX film A Bird’s-Eye View.”

  Rachel remembered seeing the movie, an hour-long feature from the perspective of a painted bunting as it escapes capture and migrates north from its wintering grounds. “Didn’t it take an award for best documentary or best cinematography?”

  “It was nominated for both,” Saxby said, “but it didn’t win either. Knapp tends to align himself with the wrong camp.”

  At that, Saxby stood and announced they were moving on. Rachel made a mental note to speak to Knapp later and ask about his upcoming projects.

  Their next stop was the shrub forest. Here the trees—pine, yaupon holly, red cedar, redbay, Hercules’ club, and wax myrtles—had grown up, and there were more and more bird sightings.

  “Prothonotary warbler,” called out a man.

  Rachel looked up and saw a golden flash, and then the bird lit high in the tree. Weat, weat, weat, weat, weat.

  “Yellow warbler,” Saxby said.

  She swung her glasses to locate the bird, but spotted another. “Gray kingbird.”

  “Where?” demanded a chorus of voices.

  “That’s a rare sighting for here,” Saxby said.

  Rachel pointed to the bird perched on a utility wire running alongside the road. She only knew what it was from a trip she’d taken with Kirk to the Florida Keys. Whitish below, grayish above, with a heavier mask, a notched tail devoid of white, and a heavy black bill, it trilled pe-teerr-it, followed by a few other guttural and metallic sounds.

  “By God, it is!” Saxby exclaimed, clapping her on the shoulder. “Well done.”

  Rachel kept her hands to herself.

  CHAPTER 4

  A half hour later, the group stopped f
or lunch in Hog Hammock, a dusty little town with small houses and an open-air market. The houses were brightly colored, and old women sat in rocking chairs on small, covered porches. Tables had been set up in the shade, and younger women speaking a mixture of African and Elizabethan English served them a traditional meal of fish perlo—a one-pot rice dish made with a vegetable and/or a meat, and traditionally seasoned with pork.

  His plate filled to the brim, Saxby had made a beeline for the table where Rachel, Lark, Dorothy, and Cecilia sat under a spreading oak. Pleasantries were exchanged, and then Dorothy asked him what he knew about the people.

  “They’re part of the Geechee culture,” he explained, “which dates back more than two hundred years. Of course, this community only dates to 1950, when R. J. Reynolds instituted his land-consolidation plan.” Saxby set down his fork and used his hands to gesture. “There were black land holdings spread out all over the island,” he said, carving the shape on a map in the air. “But Reynolds wanted to consolidate his holdings. He offered a trade: a plot of land and a house in Hog Hammock”—Saxby pointed to a spot on the fictional map—“for each black landowner’s property.” His hands swept over the imaginary island. “Needless to say, Reynolds came out ahead.” Saxby picked up his fork. “The black landowners often ended up trading for less than they gave in the exchange.”

  “Then why did they trade?” Lark asked.

  Saxby shrugged. “It’s hard to say. The Geechee have a family-oriented culture. For example, it’s customary for newlyweds to move into the husband’s parent’s home and live there until they can afford to build a home of their own. You can imagine how many multi-generational households there are. Plus, community grievances are settled in praise houses or churches.” Saxby forked some more perlo. “Maybe it made sense to them to live closer together.”

  Or maybe they had felt some outside pressure to take the deal. Tired of listening to Saxby, Rachel dabbed her mouth with her napkin and excused herself. Crossing the soft grass, she browsed the stands the crafters had set up and found herself drawn to the baskets of a beautiful dark-skinned woman in orange.